Two Movies About Dancing for Which I Feel Some Affinity, Though I've Never Seen & One Video of Defense Against Bear Hugs

Movies About Dancing for Which I Feel Some Affinity, Though I've Never Seen 1: Footloose

The first tape I ever had was the Footloose soundtrack. It was awesome. I used to play it in my little portable tape player, the kind I imagine 70s ESP investigators used when recording interviews with their subjects. The same kind that is recommended for taping T'Pau songs off the radio with.



This soundtrack had essentially all the vitamins & minerals a young American boy with terry cloth shorts needed: the far too obvious to be my favorite (even then I had obscurantist tastes) "Footloose," which has that wonderful dubby breakdown before the final chorus roll; the electro-mall-pop of "Let's Hear It for the Boy" by Deniece Williams; the treacly, hairychested loveswagger of "Almost Paradise" by Ann Wilson & Mike Reno; the Jim Steinman mini-masterpiece "Holding Out for a Hero" by Bonnie Tyler, which is surprisingly anthemic, considering it's basically about a deludedly picky woman;



"Dancing In the Sheets" by Shalamar who I believe are some kind of genetic hybrid of Sha-Na-Na & a discontinued candy bar; the contractually obligatory "I'm Free (Heaven Helps the Man)" by Kenny Loggins; the pre-lame-Van-Halen era Sammy Hagar ode to loosely-panted women "The Girl Gets Around"; "Never" by Moving Pictures, which I do not remember & the song that sticks with the most, "Somebody's Eyes" by Karla Bonoff, which I thought was exotic & mysterious when I was a kid



Despite all this personal & emotional investment in that tape I never got around to seeing the movie Footloose. I have no feelings about this fact. But it is a fact.



Movies About Dancing for Which I Feel Some Affinity, Though I've Never Seen 2: Saturday Night Fever

I'm pretty sure this movie would depress the hell out of me. I hear it's just awfully misogynistic. But it's set partially in Bay Ridge, the neighborhood I stroll through in order to see movies at The Theter & to get to watch driftwood adorned with rusty nails wash up below the Verrazzano. I want to see it in the same way people like to look at old photos of their towns from the 1920s & peek behind the burning crosses & dangling carcasses to see which houses & buildings are still there.

I'm probably never going to see this movie. I feel like if I was going to see it I would have watched in in highschool.



One Video of Defense Against Bear Hugs

A Wednesday Triptych

Ana Božičević's The Stars on the 7:18 to Penn

Ana Božičević's new chapbook, The Stars on the 7:18 to Penn, beautifully made by Kathrin Schaeppi for the dusie kollektiv, is now in its second printing & available from her site at nightcommute.org for $5/pop.

Ana is one of my favorite poets & people & I highly recommend pretty much anything she writes, makes or smiles upon.

~From The Stars on the 7:18 to Penn:
If the sign on the door signals to the passer-by that the store is OPEN, does the other side of the sign tell those inside the store that the world is CLOSED? Close up shop, put world back in business. This poem is called The Mystery of Commerce.



--
http://nightcommute.org
http://stainofpoetry.com

Let the Right One In is a Fine, Fine Film

"Fine, fine" in this instance, & only this instance, means "very good despite the terrible, cloying, awful sentimental music."

You've probably seen this movie already, which means you probably have already sat through & forgiven the awful, awful music. The most obviously appealing thing about this film is the willingness to leave questions unanswered. Whereas a Hollywood film about vampires would feel the need to explain how old the vampire is & how every aspect of vampirism happens, its enough for this film to mention flying in passing & to give occasional sneak peaks into the vampire's existence. What I think is additionally appealing is that the film extends this openness to the protagonist's life, establishing a creepy friend to his dad without defining who he is, having the mother present but undefined. The film seems to carve its own moment into a potentially full experience.

For the most part it's not even too gothy a film, which is sort of amazing, considering vampires are the hottest goths around.

Well, sometimes it's gothy:



But what the film is really about is the focus pulls & the depth of field. The shallow depth of field in the movie creates a hallucinatory intimacy. The whole film skews itself outside of the normative looking experience, twisting our attention from fingertip to palm & oftentimes keeping the focus somewhere near the middle of the perspective field.

I couldn't find the best examples of this online, but that is all right since it's more about the movement of the focus than the stills.




The best comparison I have, though it is through dramatically different cinematic techniques, is to Van Sant's Elephant. The first time I saw that film in theaters, following a character for 5 minutes through the hallways of his school only to (spoiler alert) watch him get shot, I was deeply, deeply affected. Upon subsequent viewings I decided that the unmediated attention made the kid real to me. Much like how an audience member at a play can genuinely drop the lead actor with a well-thrown baseball, the consistent attention to the kids in that film made me believe in them in a way few films (Tarkovsky's Nostalchia, is one) can.

What Let the Right One In did for me was to embody the camera's eye & presence. Much like the wandering eye of Children of Men & Come & See, the camera places me as a viewer, but not as rudely as in those film. The focus pulls are subtle & intimate & make each voyeuristic moment not only a moment of a gaze but also an assessment.

But man alive, that music sucked.

I Always Hate the Phrase Emerging Writer

As in contests for "emerging poets" or when people speak about journals being focused on "emerging writers."

The implicit structure is one of youth being a time of artistic chrysalis & then adulthood being a time of artistic beautiful-butterfly-hood. Or perhaps it is a parasitic relationship--the full grown artist has fed off its host for long enough & can now breach the body & enter the outside world.



But actual kids write & draw the most profound art there is & only through education are they forced into the social blinders. Most artistic practice seems like an attempt to recreate an engagement with the world that never learned how to drunk dial or write a perfect memo.

Everything is Pretty Awesome, Pt 2

This weekend I got to see the following people read poems: Heather Green, Chris Hosea, Heather Christle, Idra Novey, Daniel Lin, Shafer Hall & Farrah Field. Additionally it was the first time I'd met Idra & Daniel & they both seem sweet as a chestnut tree dipped in some kind of delicious caramel sauce.

I actually didn't know Daniel Lin's work at all & he knocked me out. Check out this poem, which is in the current issue of Waccamaw:

Spoon Position

Daniel Lin

A common silver spoon turned
Concave side down makes an umbrella:
A hot stream of tap water falls off
Its edges in a tight, straight skirt.
One difficulty of a rich inner life
Is the possession of desires—-firm, fixed,
Furious and almost fleshed out—-
That are found to be essentially
Unexchangeable in the social marketplace.
The spoon turned up produces a fountain.

It's such a tight poem of using the poetic attention to recreate the world. I love it.

Saturday I spent the day with Cindy, Dave Carillo, Heather Green, Justin Taylor & JC. We went to Brighton Beach & drank Russian beer from plastic two liter bottles & met up with Joshua Cohen, who has a wonderful new piece on John Zorn & lower Manhattan real estate in the latest issue of Harpers. I got a little sunburnt, as usual.

Then we all went to a poetry party at Farraf & Jared's & afterward at 2am I spun Dan Magers on some kind of spin-swing in the DUMBO park & he laughed & he laughed.

Sunday I got the swine flu, but then I got better by this morning.

Then today I saw this trainwreck of a website.

What's Going On This Week, Mathias?

Oh! So Glad you asked. A lot of things are going on.

First off, my chapbook of instructions for children's games, Play, is available from The Cupboard Pamphlet now.

Also, I am reading with Heather Christle & Idra Novey at A Public Space Thursday night. Details here.

Also, Octopus Books will be representing at the CUNY Chapbook Festival Thursday & Friday. Details here.

Also, Heather Green will be in town reading Friday at 7 at Stain Bar in Brooklyn with Jennifer Burch, Chris Hosea, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Daniel Lin, Barry Schwabsky. Details here.

Then Sunday there's a Hand Held Editions Chapbook Launch with Graham Foust, Joanna Klink & Kristina Hummel, which is at A Public Space again. Details here.

I Have No Idea What Elaine Showalter Is Talking About

It's an aside in an interview that is essentially just an ad for her book, but like, uh... what?

Q. You say a literary history has to make judgments. Give us an example of whom you see as overrated, whom underrated?

Overrated: Gertrude Stein. She played an important role in the development of modernism, but she played it for men. And she is just not readable. She became viewed as a "sister": That doesn't sanctify her work. We can criticize it.

I look with a critical eye at contemporary poetry, too. There are a great many talented woman poets today, but I don't think any of them measure up to a Sylvia Plath or Adrienne Rich. I don't feel any male poets do either.

Richmond Frsh Ink Chapbook Fest!

So J & Sommer Browning & I are heading down to Richmond, Virginia for the Fresh Ink Chapbook Festival on Sunday. We'll be selling wares from various presses & journals & reading at the event.

I think we're starting the day off, so I'll be reading at 1 & Jules & Sommer follow me.

If you're around Richmond, stop by!

however, as 1/5 of an as still to be fully launched baby thronging, this flock into last wishes as be something that gets much more of my repute

This is, hands down, the most insightful poetry blog I have ever read.

My favorite paragraph from Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues"

This was the last time I ever saw my mother alive. Just the same, this picture gets all mixed up in my mind with pictures I had other when she was younger. The way I always see her is the way she used to be on a Sunday afternoon, say, when the old folks were talking after the big Sunday dinner. I always see her wearing pale blue. She'd be sitting on the sofa. And my father would be sitting in the easy chair, not far from her. And the living room would be full of church folks and relatives. There they sit, in chairs all around the living room, and the night is creeping up outside, but nobody knows it yet. You can see the darkness growing against the windowpanes and you hear the street noises every now and again, or maybe the jangling beat of a tambourine from one of the churches close by, but it's real quiet in the room. For a moment nobody's talking, but every face looks darkening, like the sky outside. And my mother rocks a little from the waist, and my father's eyes are closed. Everyone is looking at something a child can't see. For a minute they've forgotten the children. Maybe a kid is lying on the rug, half asleep. Maybe somebody's got a kid in his lap and is absent-mindedly stroking the lad's head. Maybe there's a kid, quiet and big-eyed, curled up in a big chair in the comer. The silence, the darkness coming, and the darkness in the faces frighten the child obscurely. He hopes that the hand which strokes his forehead will never stop-will never die. He hopes that there will never come a time when the old folks won't be sitting around the living room, talking about where they've come from, and what they've seen, and what's happened to them and their kinfolk.

Tuesday: Michael Dumanis Reading at New School

Luckily tomorrow night is not a full moon, because in addition to being an awesome poet & one of the most intense readers I've seen, Michael Dumanis is also a bloodthirsty werewolf. He's been known to leap over bridges & overturn city buses in the hunt for fresh blood. But, again, tomorrow is not a full moon. So you can leave your silver bullets at home tomorrow night & just do the whole enjoying-poetry thing.

Here's the listing from the New School's write up:

The New School
66 West 12th Street
Room 510
6:30 pm
Free for New School students/faculty, $5 General Public


Michael Dumanis
My Soviet Union (University of Massachusetts Press)

For his first collection of poems, My Soviet Union, Michael Dumanis won the Juniper Prize for Poetry from the University of Massachusetts Press. He also co-edited the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century with the poet Cate Marvin. Dumanis edited the sections featuring poetry from Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Macedonia, Russia, and Slovakia in the forthcoming anthology The New European Poets (Graywolf Press), edited by Kevin Prufer and Wayne Miller. His poems have appeared in journals including Conduit, New England Review, Post Road, Prairie Schooner, and Verse. Moderated by Honor Moore, faculty, the Writing Program.

Draughtsman's Contract is a Fine, Fine Film

Draughtsman's Contract seems like it must have been made under heavy influence of Lacan, though as far as I can see from Greenaway's discussion of the film, theory was not at all part of his intellectual process. Within the film the mimetic function of art is in fact the limited perspective of the individual ego, but this gaze becomes the active agent of morbid manipulation. The gaze (which is, of course, the gaze of the sexualized outsider -- the one in the black wig rather than the denaturing white wigs) is unintentional, a catalyst of action rather than a controlling action in itself, yet it is also the gaze that defines & engenders the future.





Not having ever thought about landscape illustration before in my life, it was exciting to watch the artist frame the world through his cool little grid tool & then begin to work from this perspective. Greenaway must have been just as delighted by this tool, as he twists the grid into multiple points of view. There is an implicit, though undefined, discussion of the work of art & how it relates to the glorification of the real & the economically imagined (undefined in a fruitful way). But more than that, it recuts the frame of the screen into separate frames, thereby emphasizing the artificial geometries of the pleasure garden aesthetic. And in a film that is ultimately a kind of heist film, with the requisite double & triple crossings, these frames of vision becomes analogous to the frames of trust & manipulation.




But of course the only thing Greenaway likes more than smarty-pants stuff is men in ridiculous wigs acting ostentatiously like prisses. And we get a lot of that in this film. Even the protagonist, who portrays himself as a rebel & outsider, is a cultivation of preciousness. In a way the film feels like a counterpoint to Kubrick's Barry Lyndon. Both films are of nearly the same era (or it seems so from an American point of view, I'm sure it doesn't seem that way to a British person) & wander through the world of the elite with predominantly natural lighting. But while Kubrick's mannerist film is constantly undercut by the ruthless, vile, heartlessness of the main character, Greenaway's film forefronts the ruthlessness to the point where you feel like you understand the moral landscape. And then the depth of class-construction is revealed as the real world of the film.